cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:
It seems to me that there is a double edge sword to these issues and their expression as in the quotes above.Anyway it seems to prove that the idea of freedom was current round about 1776. Interestingly the idea of freedom and parliamentary democracy always refers to the (g)olden days of the 18th century and the American and French revolution.here are some more more recent uotes:"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation." -- General Douglas MacArthur"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1953"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never, -- in nothing great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." -- Winston Churchill "Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we're not vigilant." -- Clint Eastwood in an essay he wrote for the January 12, 1997 issue of Parade Magazine
Enough so, that while the issue that began this thread is, I agree, worth ruminating over a bit - not so much in an 'us vs. they' sort of way. Can we identity freedom/democracy with reason, then despair over our ability to distinguish, with reason, the distinction between true assaults on our freedoms from necessary vigilance in defense of those freedoms.
Further - "we" are they. In delivering powerful technology into the anxiously awaiting hands of the bureaucracies, we are empowering any pre-existing trends toward standardization, centralization, dehumanization. Technologist - of either the open or closed source varieties - have no basis to separate themselves from "they". There are reasons I support the Open Source alternative - but at the same time find the basis on which the community congratulates itself as the righteous players in this developing future - to be too little. I had once, for example, raised the question here whether there were ethical issues that should be addressed in connection with the inclusion of a particular piece of software in an educational related Open Source distribution - issues that were unrelated to its license. I was told pretty roughly that I was being irrelevant.
I was disturbed. Art